Electrical Engineering to Organise a Seminar on Cyber-Physical Systems

Monday, December 24, 2018 - 11:00am to 12:00pm
Dean's Smart Room, 4th Floor, SBASSE, LUMS

A Perspective of Safe and Secure Cyber-Physical Systems: From Hardware to Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Dr. Arslan Munir (Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Kansas State University (K-State))

Date and Day: Monday, December 24, 2018

Time: 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Venue: Dean's Smart Room, 4th Floor, SBASSE, LUMS


Abstract

The applications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have proliferated in a variety of domains, such as smart grid, medical monitoring, transportation, autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial control systems, and new applications of CPS are being envisioned. Many of the CPS applications are mission-critical and safety-critical, which require safety and security to be integrated in the design of CPS.

In this seminar, the Dr. Munir will present a perspective that in order to design truly safe and secure CPS, safety and security needs to be integrated in the design, not as an afterthought, at multiple levels ranging from hardware to artificial intelligence (AI). He will elaborate this perspective from an automotive CPS example where he will present his prior research that integrates dependability and security primitives in hardware. Moreover, he will then highlight that as CPS are becoming autonomous and intelligent, safety and security of AI embedded in CPS also needs consideration. Furthermore, he will later demonstrate the vulnerability of AI to attacks and will also present a potential mitigation technique based on his prior research. 

Speaker's Biography

Dr. Munir is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Kansas State University (K-State). He is a founding Director of the Intelligent Systems, Computer Architecture, Analytics, and Security (ISCAAS) laboratory at K-State. He holds a Michelle Munson-Serban Simu Keystone Research Faculty Scholarship from the College of Engineering. He was a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA from May 2012 to June 2014. He received his M.A.Sc. in ECE from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, in 2007 and his PhD in ECE from the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, Florida, USA, in 2012. From 2007 to 2008, he worked as a Software Development Engineer at Mentor Graphics in the Embedded Systems Division.

Dr. Munir's current research interests include embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems, secure and trustworthy systems, hardware-based security, Computer Architecture, Multicore, Parallel Computing, Distributed Computing, Reconfigurable Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) safety and security, Data Analytics, and Fault Tolerance. He received many academic awards including the Doctoral Fellowship from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, gold medals for best performance in Electrical Engineering, and gold medals and academic roll of honour for securing rank one in pre-engineering examinations. He has published more than 50 scholarly peer-reviewed articles related to his research interests. His research accomplishments have been covered by various news and media outlets. He currently serves as an Editor for IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. 

Target Audience

The faculty and students who are interested in distributed embedded systems, CPS and safety and security in these two domains. The speaker would also like to motivate the graduate students to pursue PhD in the US and particularly, at Kansas State University (K-State).